The Case For the Blue Collar Coder

theodp writes "U.S. tech talent shortage discussions tend to focus on getting more young people to go to college to become CS grads. Nothing wrong with that, writes Anil Dash, but let's not forget about education which teaches mid-level programming as a skilled trade, suitable for apprenticeship and advancement in a way that parallels traditional trade skills like HVAC or welding. Dash encourages less of a focus on 'the next Zuckerberg' in favor of encouraging solid middle-class tech jobs that are primarily focused on creating and maintaining tech infrastructure in non-tech companies. Dash also suggests 'changing the conversation about recruiting technologists from the existing narrow priesthood of highly-skilled experts constantly chasing new technologies to productive workers getting the most out of widely-deployed platforms and frameworks.'"

Comments

Coding is a skill, not a profession

[concealment]

This makes sense to me. Most of the best programmers I've known are guys who otherwise would be installing air conditioners, fixing big trucks or re-wiring buildings.

Coding is not a profession. It's a skill, which is a part of a series of job descriptions and career paths, but in itself it's a form of knowledge more like what an electrician has than what professionals like architects, doctors, lawyers and assassins must know.

Apprenticeship is an excellent idea since most of the "best practices" can't be taught at a school, and apprenticeship allows people with applied skills to shine, instead of schools where those with excellent detail memorization shine. Most of the best programmers I know either never went to school for it, or didn't do all that well at school.

Bring back the hacker aesthetic. Professions are for those who want to super-specialize and master specific high-level skills. Hacking is something anyone with the gumption and dedication can do. As the world expands into mobile devices, ordinary people are writing code every day.

That being said, CS needs to find a new career type that might belong to professions. I suggest "product architect" (like Steve Jobs) and "total systems integrators" (like what the Google guys do, interoperability) for those who will need college degrees or equivalent and a professional mindset.

Re:Coding is a skill, not a profession

[Anonymous Coward]

That's all well and good until you find out they've been using floating point for currency calculations, and they can't figure out why their bubble sorts are so slow.

I've worked with programmers with associates degrees. Some bad; some good. I'm not entirely against them, but I would not want an entire team made up of them. They have huge blind spots that CS grads don't have.

Re:Coding is a skill, not a profession

[mikael_j]

And I've seen guys with Master's degrees in CS and systems science using floats for currency calculations. I've even been the one to clean up after them, despite the fact that I dropped out of college and by the standards of some people should be the one using hash tables where I should be using lists, floats where I should be using decimals, shouldn't know what a modulo operator is, shouldn't have a clue when it comes to how the quicksort algorithm works, should never even have heard of big O notation...

Just as you shouldn't assume that everyone without a degree is completely lacking in skills you also shouldn't assume that a degree somehow makes someone competent, there are hordes of developers out there who took CS in college in the late 90's because they thought "computers = big money" and somehow managed to graduate. Hell, looking at a lot of the guys I went to HS with who went on to major in CS in college I suspect most of those just thought "I like computer games so why not study something with computer in its name?", I even had a few people like that as classmates in college (gotta love being the only one in a four man team actually writing code, the others all volunteered to write the documentation)...

And no, I don't think I'm a "rock star coder", I'd consider my skills as a developer to be pretty average. A decent enough CRUD and business coder who writes some slightly more interesting code in his free time.

Re:Coding is a skill, not a profession

[Dcnjoe60]

Another thing lacking in the traditional CS route is understanding of the business one is coding for. I managed projects for a large taxing authority. We found it much more productive to take existing employees who understood the various tax procedures and workflows in the department and train them to program versus hiring CS graduates and train them in tax policy and procedures. People from the "floor" have a totally different insight than management and CS graduates and their insight leads to much more efficient ways of doing things. Of course, the people we pulled from the floor did have an aptitude for programming and desingFor the record, we also hired some CS graduates, depending on specific skill sets needed.

Business IT shops would do much better to consider apprenticeship programs. What is taught in most CS programs did not transfer well into what we needed most. My recommendation to students wanting to pursue a career in IT would be to get a business administration degree with various CS classes as electives (or even minor in CS). That is, unless, you want to work for the big tech companies, in which case, I would flip that and go CS with a minor in business.

At least that is how it works in the Midwest of the US.

Re:Coding is a skill, not a profession

[BVis]

Training existing employees in needed skills represents a conscious desire to improve the skill set of your existing employees, so you gain ability without the expense and hassle of finding someone new to hire. It treats your employees like assets to be improved, not liabilities to be minimized.

Unfortunately, ISTM that most employers would rather rip off an arm than provide training for their employees. Their logic is that helping employees to expand their skill sets only leads to freshly trained employees that quickly leave because they can make more money/improve their working conditions/get away from a horrible manager by going to another employer. The problem is, while it's short-sighted, they're right. Keeping employees happy is expensive, complicated and time-consuming. Lots of times, it requires a change in the corporate culture. It's hard to go from treating your employees like liabilities and cost centers to treating them like assets. It's *very* hard to convince employees that the culture has genuinely changed; they'll assume it's just another case of management saying all the right things while not actually changing anything of substance, which they have more than likely done before.

In an ideal world, companies that treated their people like shit would quickly find themselves without employees, having had said employees leave to go to another employer that treats them like human beings. (The free market in action, no?) The trouble is that, in practice, the employee is at a severe disadvantage when it comes to how their employer treats them. Their employer basically controls their entire lives (literally, in the case of employer-provided health insurance). Wage slavery is a real thing, and the norm. Most companies treat their employees just well enough to keep them from leaving immediately, which results in employees doing just enough work to not get fired. Management does not want to provide the employee with more ammunition in the battle by making them more marketable as employees; they like them right where they are. Yeahh, I'm going to need you to go ahead and come in on Saturday, mmkay?

Re:Coding is a skill, not a profession

[The Snowman]

into some enterprise software where bubble sort is fine

For fuck's sake, a business dataset is never going to be so small that "bubble sort is fine".

You see, people? Do you see? This is why we fucking need college.

The real issue here is talking about the sorting method to begin with. Coding is like playing with Legos. You plug in the "sorting brick" and forget about it. Whatever library you are using should have a properly optimized sorting algorithm with any necessary speed hacks or whatever else is required. Such a library should be well-tested and proven.

Unless you're a Ph.D. candidate looking into sorting highly specialized data sets such as Google's search index, you have no business implementing a search algorithm. You need to be using whatever standard implementation is defined by the language or framework libraries.

At this point in the evolution of Computer Science, "sorting" is a problem that is solved. People smarter than either of us have proven that O(n log n) is the fastest it gets, and we have multiple algorithms to do it. Other smart people have plugged these algorithms into standard libraries and frameworks. People dumber than us decide to reinvent the wheel. /facepalm.

Re:Coding is a skill, not a profession

[0100010001010011]

Fixed point is very much a lost art. There should be an entire class dedicated to it and anyone in ME or EE that wants to do robotics should be forced to take it. We have to train every single CS, ME and EE that comes in how to do it in Simulink (We use auto code generation and fixed point everything before production).

I do embedded controls and floating points are 'expensive' with most of the chips we use. They're still not that common. But people don't understand how much faster they can be than floats when your stuff doesn't have an FPU.

I picked up an Arduino and ran some floating point vs fixed point benchmarks:

Each of these calculations was run 500,000 times.
d=a+b; e=c+b-a;
f=a+b+c; g=a*b*c;

Floating point:
a=1.1298373 b=2.3249869 c=3.8923873
d=3.4548244 e=5.0875368 f=7.3472118 g=10.22
Execution Time: **14528 ms**

Int:
Integer Representations:
a=36 b=74 c=124
d=110 e=162 f=234 g=2656
Floating Numbers:
a=1.1250000 b=2.3125000 c=3.8750000
d=3.4375000 e=5.0625000 f=7.3125000 g=0.0625000
Execution Time: **348 ms**

Long Int:
Long Representations:
a=36 b=74 c=124
d=110 e=162 f=234 g=330336
Floating Numbers:
a=1.1250 b=2.3125 c=3.8750
d=3.4375 e=5.0625 f=7.3125 g=10.0625000
Execution Time: **1951 ms**

Now when you're using a 16 Mhz controller to make das blinken lights it doesn't matter. But when you start getting into autonomous control and trying to do real time processing of a few dozen sensors to make sure your flying robot doesn't smash into the wall it does matter.

Re:Coding is a skill, not a profession

[0xdeadbeef]

There are two egregiously flawed assumptions in what I quoted, and neither of them have anything to do with the prevalence of standard libraries.

One is that it is acceptable for enterprise software to be slow, presumably because it always is. That is the broken window theory in action. People with that mentality will never be anything but the mediocre programmers and will never seek to undersand anything beyond what it takes to not get fired.

The other is that the difference between sorting algorithms is simply a choice on speed, as if you're comparing a Camry to a Ferrari, where one is better than the other but they'll both get you were you want to go. That is the kind of ignorance that leads to cargo cult programming, doing something in some situation because you know you're supposed to without ever understanding why. It is well and good to tell them to use what is already available, but how they fuck will they ever know which one to use in what situation?

Tolerating this because we need cogs who crank it out for cheap is why shitty software is so common. It debases the profession.

Re:Coding is a skill, not a profession

[tibman]

How many hours did you sit in class learning how to sort? It was probably an hour. Why spend years in college for something you could research online in less time than your college registration would take. I'm simplifying but meh.

Re:Coding is a skill, not a profession

[RKBA]

Personally I yearn for good ole' BCD arithmetic.

Already blue collar

[Anonymous Coward]

It's been a blue collar job for most of us ever since I've been coding professionally (since about 2000).

I am a blue collar coder

[Big Hairy Ian]

Been in the business for over 20 years now. The only issue I have makes getting jobs difficult as too many companies wont touch you without a degree.

BTW The closest my school had to Computer Science was a couple of Commodore Pets and a maths teacher who thought all that was involved with CS was logic. Ah well where there's a geek there's a way :)

Of-course

[udachny]

I have been arguing this for quite a while, there should be more apprentices and fewer university graduates with insurmountable debt, however this is not going to happen given the labour regulations, tax incentives, even inflation. All of these prevent jobs from appearing. A businessman doesn't need an incentive to hire people, his incentive is to make more money, it exists already. What he needs is not to have incentives to do things that are not actually useful to him. A business could have a bunch of apprentices, if it was possible to pay them a very low wage. As things stand (never mind the inflation, which kills savings and jobs), the labour law makes it illegal to hire people below minimum wage while still allowing to have students as 'apprentices' who have to work for free. All this does is incentivizes the kids to go to higher education, where they don't actually need to, while working for free as apprentices, while getting deeper and deeper into debt. Instead the kids must be able to skip school entirely and learn the trade at work making a little bit of money, that would give them an incentive to show up and do the work, while not getting into debt and learning the skills. This is something that businesses have always done before governments screwed this up.

Re:Programming is applied Math

[cnettel]

Programming, in this sense, is applied method calling into your supporting libraries and framework. It has more similarities to designing a nice-looking Word template or using Excel in not overly creative ways. If a programmer of this kind ends up designing her own algorithms or even worse a full class hierarchy, it will surely end up on thedayilywtf. The thing is, they should not need to. You don't expect a household electrician to rewire stuff with a new transformer design just because it seemed fun to do for one specific customer and maybe 10% more efficient. You do standard stuff in standard ways. It's not trivial, but it's all done within well-defined bounds.

I would never want this kind of a job, but if you consider how many things that are still done manually in one way or another by people having GFLOPS on their desktops, it's also obvious that cheaper and more plentiful access to people able to just crank out code to do stuff has a tremendous value.

That's a Very Generic Thesis

[eldavojohn]

This makes sense to me. Most of the best programmers I've known are guys who otherwise would be installing air conditioners, fixing big trucks or re-wiring buildings.

There is a substantial amount of math and logic that should be used as a foundation for programming. I know the coworkers that would otherwise be installing air conditioners when I ask people if they thing we could use a more functional-type language for a new project instead of an object oriented language. You're usually met with blank stares.

Coding is not a profession. It's a skill

This could be said about anything that people pay you to do. Anything.

which is a part of a series of job descriptions and career paths, but in itself it's a form of knowledge more like what an electrician has than what professionals like architects, doctors, lawyers and assassins must know.

What? Look, I think you're trying to discuss what you feel is the percentage between creativity and regurgitation in each of the above subjects. And I will tell you right now that all those fields are diverse with jobs that require more than one of the other. If you want to say programming requires more creativity and that's something that cannot be taught then at least give me a compelling argument for that.

Bring back the hacker aesthetic. Professions are for those who want to super-specialize and master specific high-level skills. Hacking is something anyone with the gumption and dedication can do. As the world expands into mobile devices, ordinary people are writing code every day.

If only you could see the spaghetti code I've seen. Ordinary people are free to write code, in fact I love that and I hope that continues to expand. But when you're talking about commercial grade software being written for a company that is being sold to people for real money ... that's when I start to cringe that "good enough to tinker with in my home means good enough to be deployed to millions of personal devices across the world."

That being said, CS needs to find a new career type that might belong to professions. I suggest "product architect" (like Steve Jobs) and "total systems integrators" (like what the Google guys do, interoperability) for those who will need college degrees or equivalent and a professional mindset.

Personally I value my liberal arts college degree and I think my employer does as well. I can communicate better with customers and I now understand much more of the world now than I did in high school (when I thought I knew everything).

You're free to apply to jobs but when you're going up against people who have rigorously studied mathematics, logic, philosophy, English, etc you have to be ready to show an employer what you're made of before your application is automatically rejected by some routine resume sorting algorithm. It's not that those algorithms are correct, it's just that employers are too lazy to spend two hours with every single person on the planet trying to find the right applicant. Instead, if I didn't go to college, I'd buy a virtual private server and be going to town on developing things that look good so I can show them off. Honestly, I think it was easier, more fun and more eye-opening (yet way more expensive) for me to go to a liberal arts college. It's your life, so do what you want. You can tell the recruiters they're doing it wrong but then again it's their job and that's their decision. This sounds like some very talented hackers venting about the problems with entering into the workforce.

Re:That's a Very Generic Thesis

[Attila Dimedici]

If only you could see the spaghetti code I've seen. Ordinary people are free to write code, in fact I love that and I hope that continues to expand. But when you're talking about commercial grade software being written for a company that is being sold to people for real money ... that's when I start to cringe that "good enough to tinker with in my home means good enough to be deployed to millions of personal devices across the world."

Have you seen the wiring put into houses by people who are "good enough to tinker with in my own home" when it comes to electrical work? It makes spaghetti code look straightforward. I've known several people who were very good "handyman" electricians. If you needed one new outlet run, or a single light fixture added, they were very bit as good and reliable as a certified electrician. But, if they wired more than five or six circuits in a house (usually only happened if it was the house they owned and lived in), if you needed someone else to wire anything in the house (such as after they sold it) you would usually have to rewire the whole house in order to figure out what outlets and fixtures were on what circuits.

Re:That's a Very Generic Thesis

[FlyingGuy]

There is a substantial amount of math and logic that should be used as a foundation for programming. I know the coworkers that would otherwise be installing air conditioners when I ask people if they thing we could use a more functional-type language for a new project instead of an object oriented language. You're usually met with blank stares.

So very sorry but I must take exception with this. The "substantial amount of math" comes down to the 4 basic operations. Even partial differential equations come down to it with lots of looping. Really good programmers are not mathematicians for the most part. Really good programmers understand the machine and mathematicians dream up equations that do "something" and then explain in terms that can be translated into code.

And as to the bit about functional -v- object oriented languages, your tipping your "coding snobbery" hand a bit and indicating you are the kind of person who just wants to play with the newest toys. All the languages out there are mostly based on C and no one has yet been able to come up with anything that is actually better, but is rather simply a derivative. Yes syntactic sugar abounds but strip that away and you have C. Functional languages are almost pure syntactical sugar as the underlying code that is generated is still the basic loop and branch that applies to all languages regardless of their style and name.

Computer Science is applied math

[sjbe]

Why would we want more un/under educated programmers?

Because there is a lot of work that needs to be done that doesn't require a degree in computer science and people with those degrees tend to be expensive. You don't want under educated people but there is a cost to having over-educated people as well.

Programming is applied Math and very few high school students are going to be equipped to do it well.

Computer science is math whereas programming can be a bit more abstract than that. Programs are a set of instructions to a machine and sufficiently abstracted it really doesn't require deep knowledge of math for someone to do useful work. While ultimately any computer program can be reduced to mathematical equations, the actual programming often really isn't math from a practical standpoint. To use the simplest possible example, I don't need to know any mathematics to write "hello world". Up to a certain level, being able to instruct a machine requires little/no specialized training. Think of it a bit like saying that an electrician putting some wires in your house should require a bachelors degree in electrical engineering - the extra training would be pointless almost all the time. Lots of useful work can be done by those with less formal training.

In fact it's to our benefit to write tools to make simpler problems solvable by more people and free up those who are more highly trained working on more difficult problems. That said, there does come a level of sophistication where you need someone with more understanding of the underlying concepts. Just like a nurse can help you to a point but once the problem gets sufficiently complicated you need a doctor who has a deeper understanding of what is going on.

what use?

[O('_')O_Bush]

Sure, this would be great if programs required no math, were short, single threaded, didn't require complex algorithms, and didn't require interfacing to other things... but that isn't how programming works in the real world. If your design can be done by someone with the education levels or mental faculties of a welder, it can be done by outsourced talent more cheaply anyways.

What we need is more specialized, difficult, and deep CS programs, not programs that people can sleep through and come out of with little technical knowledge beyond Java application development.

Re:what use?

[gbjbaanb]

Unfortunately that's all businesses care about nowadays - you're more likely to get a job because you know how to use Visual Studio than you are if you know how to program effectively. Today much of the technical expertise is being eroded in 2 ways:

Developers being given RAD tools where coding is more "if you do this it just works, don't think how it works, just trust it does". This is particularly relevant in the .NET world where Visual Studio isn't a tool to help you code, its a tool that defines your environment and tries to envelop you in wizards and properties (its the only tool I know that has 2 property sections that refer to different types of properties!). Sure, you can use it as a glorified text editor, but you can also use it as a giant configuration machine.

The other is obviously the continual chasing of new technologies. Nobody becomes an expert in anything anymore, they;re too busy catching up with the latest, and once there.. its time to drop that old cruft in favour of something shiny and new. Sometimes this is peer/industry pressure, sometimes its forced upon you by the tool manufacturer (Windows Phone anyone?)

Now I exaggerate slightly, but only so much. There are people who get to code the old-fashioned way, but I think they get called system engineers now, rather than application engineers, and I know a lot of support guys prefer "plain-speaking" files to "magic" packages, but in the whole, the industry of app engineers is definitely moving towards treating programmers as plug-and-configure resources.

Still, Microsoft will sell you more tools that do more stuff "for you", the Architects will adopt them as they want to play with the new shiny and the PHBs will buy them to keep up with 'latest standards' and the cycle repeats forever.

Germany - 1960's

[MadMaverick9]

They've had that in Germany since the 1960's.

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematisch-Technischer_Assistent

Re:Germany - 1960's

[Anonymous Coward]

A highly misleading post, not least since the link is in German.
Yes, MTAs have been around for quite a while, but they require either a "Realschul" Diploma or a full-blown Abitur (says so in the linked article), which more often than not includes material that's usually taught in freshman years at colleges in the States.
So, it's back to the main point, namely, that you need to go to college for at least a year in the States. Then you might as well finish your CS degree.

IT / tech needs apprenticeship not years of colleg

[Joe_Dragon]

IT / tech needs apprenticeship not years of college with big skills gaps.

And the tech schools get dragged down by having to be part of the college systems and some of the college time table.

The Case for the "Blue Collar" Coder

[Anonymous Coward]

"U.S. tech talent shortage discussions tend to focus on getting more young people to go to college to become CS grads"

THERE IS NO TECH TALENT SHORTAGE. What there is, is disinformation about what one needs to really
know to really program. Plenty of unemployed and students out there who have figured this out.
But they are blocked out of the market by both employers, employment agencies and state unemployment offices
who don't have a CLUE as to the nature of the skills needed and have created a ridiculous artificial set
of evaluative criteria.

In addition, there are brilliant programmers out there with no degrees or associate's degrees or liberal arts degrees.

Also, you do NOT need calculus to program or be a software engineer.
You do NOT need Dykstra.
You do NOT need to know how to write a compiler.

There is no "Blue Collar".... there are competent skilled programmers, reasonably skilled ones, screw-ups, and Ivy League graduates with big degrees who would not last a 10th of a second in real world programming. I know, I've worked with all of them.

There is one key JOB REQUIREMENT in this field. The ability to deal with the unknown, to learn and to adjust. Period.

Reading and communication skills are paramount too. Above all else.

From a retired Software Engineer of 32 years experience

Looking at things the wrong way.

[Jartan]

The problem with looking at coding this way is too many people will fail. When you're looking for a vocation/apprenticeship the last thing you want is something risky.

It's also way too volatile. Training to be a "microsoft .net programmer" is insane. You're whole profession could get flushed down the toilet instantly.

All that education is necessary to constantly retrain yourself.

Is This Rhetorical?

[bistromath007]

What I mean: the article says "let's not forget that we can do this, too!"

Can we? I've... never heard of anything like this. Which annoys me, because I'd really like to do it. I want to learn coding, but I am not a self-motivated hacker stereotype. I need a project given to me, and if I'm operating without guidance, there is a ceiling on the types of problems I can solve in a timely fashion. I'm not stupid, but I'm not brilliant either, or at least I haven't been called that since high school, (which I dropped out of) and generally programming is considered something only a supergenius should be allowed to do, especially by programmers.

I know this isn't true, as I've taken a programming course once at a community college and did well and enjoyed myself. But taking a course means I get to do a bunch of stuff that I never use because I can't find work related to it, if at all, and so I forget it. An apprenticeship is the only way I can think of that would supply me with steady work to cement the skills in my head. As far as I know, apprenticeships do not exist, because those who would be masters usually believe in the old-school cowboy hacker DIY-elitism. The most help they'll offer is "here's a book about a language you might be able to understand. Get to work, you pleb."

What work? I have no idea what I want to code! Just give me something.

The next Zuckerberg?

[aNonnyMouseCowered]

You mean the next undergrad to drop out of college thinking he can change the world with one hot idea? Education would be wasted on the next Zuckerberg. Just introduce him to some venture capitlaist with money to burn and let the wheel of fortune spin.

My god, it's a liberal arts major :)

[concealment]

I enjoy your comments on the site, so you'll get more than the standard drive-by response from me.

There is a substantial amount of math and logic that should be used as a foundation for programming. I know the coworkers that would otherwise be installing air conditioners when I ask people if they thing we could use a more functional-type language for a new project instead of an object oriented language.

First, I'd like to make it clear that I am not scornful of these fields. Air-conditioning installing, building wiring, etc. are not devoid of creativity and intelligence requirements.

In fact, like programming, there's a huge gulf between doing it and doing it right that is determined by degree of intelligence and creativity.

You may find that intelligence level is the difference between the blank starers and the thinkers, if you look back over the years.

Look, I think you're trying to discuss what you feel is the percentage between creativity and regurgitation in each of the above subjects. And I will tell you right now that all those fields are diverse with jobs that require more than one of the other. If you want to say programming requires more creativity and that's something that cannot be taught then at least give me a compelling argument for that.

I'm not communicating effectively here. I'm not trying to make this a comparison of creativity levels, or regurgitation, except to say that I think education over-emphasizes regurgitation, which is not the skill that differentiates an excellent programmer from a hum-drum one. This was a statement I made in support of the apprenticeship idea.

Professionals are different from all other careers in two crucial ways: first, they must be able to handle a huge amount of detail and balance those details against one another; second, they are responsible for greater impact than most others, and as a result need to have critical thinking, leadership and human perception skills that are not normally required.

I'm thinking of doctors, lawyers, CEOs, architects and probably a few other groups here. I don't know if creativity is what is needed; most jobs call for inventiveness, or the ability to apply different forms with a bit of fudging so that new uses arise. But so does life itself.

Are we shuffling too many people into these professions? Yes, unquestionably so, just like we're sending too many people to college. This doesn't mean we should forget what these professions actually require, especially since most who attempt them fail.

If only you could see the spaghetti code I've seen. Ordinary people are free to write code, in fact I love that and I hope that continues to expand. But when you're talking about commercial grade software being written for a company that is being sold to people for real money ... that's when I start to cringe that "good enough to tinker with in my home means good enough to be deployed to millions of personal devices across the world."

Why do you assume I haven't seen similar forms of spaghetti code? The first workplace skill I mastered was Lamaze breathing so I could avoid shouting expletives when looking over other people's projects. However, I'd be lying if I said these people were not well-credentialed. Some came from what are considered good schools and had good resumes, and make more money than just about anyone else.

Ordinary people are going to be writing more code. For most coding, what is required isn't a mystery. In fact, it's well known and well publicized, so that cut-paste-and-modify programming will continue to be the norm. If you haven't looked at the average web developer these days, you might take a peek, and you may see where programming is going. Mastery of libraries, frameworks and commonly needed syntactical devices has replaced the roll-your-own coder.

You're free to apply to jobs but when you're going up agains

Re:In other words...

[judoguy]

That's really the historical American dream. Most people will only want to work somewhere where they get decent pay for decent work, but no real hope of wealth. It's the exceptional person that is willing not to just move up in a company over time, but to really make the effort to go for the gold.

I see this all the time in business, sports, entertainment, investing, etc. Most people are willing to work for a tangible reward, but only a few are really ready to risk everything for huge success.

I'm not talking about lottery ticket buyers here, but people willing to take calculated risks in a productive way knowing that they might fail and will pick up the pieces and try again if it fails. Probably the best world has a stable base of workers from which true entrepreneurs can launch.

Same old whine

[0xdeadbeef]

Beware anyone who calls your profession a "priesthood", because he operates under the assumption that he is entitled to more than you, is either jealous or contemptuous of your market salary and wants to put you in your place. For whatever reason our culture regards doctors, lawyers, stockbrokers, and CEOs as deserving the benefits of scarcity, but it is a huge problem when you can't you hire a computer nerd for less than six figures. If you aren't an extrovert, you don't deserve to be on top of the status hierarchy.

We already have vocational technology education, but it's widely regarded as a joke. Putting it in high school isn't going to change that. And if you have the knack for it, learning programming or learning computer maintenance is easy. After all, every time the subject of college degrees come up, there are always people very adamant that they didn't need one, and that "the best people I know didn't go to college". So if it is unnecessary, why are they arguing for "blue collar" programmers? These people argue "nature" in one breath and then "nurture" in the next. Dash is actually saying that the self-educated or non-degreed don't deserve to be considered "white collar" professionals.

Dash also makes the mistake of conflating programming with "IT", something the Slashdot peanut gallery is also apt to do. I'll leave that stupidity for a different flame war.

Uh, shortage?

[rsilvergun]

There's no shortage of tech workers, which is why you can't get college bound kids interested. Off shoring + H1B Visas has seen to that.

I'm pretty skeptical of this entire story. In my experience whenever anyone talks about retraining blue collar workers for tech work it's just a desperate attempt to deal with the fact that robots and outsourcing have made these people obsolete, and we want to pretend there's something for them all to do besides starve...

Craftsmanship doesn't come without understanding..

[Fished]

I actually regard the fact that someone could say this as a great example of why computer science education is broken. The reality is that there's a tremendous amount of REALLY BAD code out there, written by C.S. Majors and non-C.S. Majors alike. I'm minded of one case where a self-taught perl programmer in a company I worked for absolutely could not figure out why his code to convert a few megabytes of data was taking days to run. Turned out he was appending to a string in order to add a few bytes to it, and every time he did it perl was copying the string to a new location. Simply by "pre-allocating" the string we cut the run time down to a couple of hours. This would have been obvious to him if he'd ever coded in C, or taken a data structures class. But he hadn't. Things like data structures, algorithms, and most importantly security are hard. They can't be taught in a trade school, because people in trade schools lack the necessary background. In the case above, I tried to explain to the guy the whole concept of "big O", and quickly discovered that he didn't know what a factorial was, nor a logarithm, and was a bit sketchy on the concept of geometric expansion. Please don't dump more half-trained programmers on us. We don't need them, and those of us who do understand information theory (with or without degrees) will spend way too much time fixing their errors. I'm not saying everyone needs to be a CS major (my B.S. is in Philosophy, my masters is in Theology, and my Ph.D. is in New Testament.) I AM saying that there should be a requirement to learn some basic skill before you're allowed to write code for a living.

Blue collar coder - it's redundant

[blind biker]

All developers, programmers, researchers - we're all blue collar. People working in administration and accounting are considered white collar.

As a scientist, I don't feel insulted to be "blue collar". I'm fine with that.

I don't think apprenticeships are it...

[XDirtypunkX]

Part of the reason I don't think an apprenticeship model works for teaching programming is that by its nature it is a scholarly profession. I don't mean that in the ivory tower way, I mean that programming is largely research based and requires an active mind. You need meta-skills of the kind that allow you to assess, filter and process a lot of information, but be able to focus in on and find the particular bits that are relevant to you. Doing an university degree often teaches this skill indirectly and some people develop it themselves though natural dedication (autodidacts). I don't think an apprenticeship style of learning gives people the time or inclination to do this. More practical experience and mentoring is definitely valuable, but it shouldn't be the sum total of a programming education.

I also think that there is also a defensive thinking mindset required to properly produce robust software that requires a certain level of formal knowledge as well as practical experience. Degrees at the moment don't necessarily teach this, but you do see a lot of software written without this knowledge and quite often it becomes obvious that it's only going to work *some* of the time and quite a lot of this software comes from people with a weak formal education (but not all of it).

Floating point in financial transactions

[sjbe]

Huh? Floats is the standard representation of numbers almost everywhere.

Not in financial transactions. While there are ways to do financial transactions with floating point numbers, they have an alarming tendency to introduce rounding errors. When you are dealing in money, rounding errors are an extremely bad thing because then the books don't balance anymore. One common way to deal with the problem of rounding floats is to treat the stuff to left of the decimal as an integer and the stuff to the right as another integer since there are no rounding issues with integers. While not as fast as floats, the extra accuracy is worth it in this instance. There are other ways to solve this problem but you'll find conventional floating point is used with great caution in the financial world.

There's a reason floats are implemented in hardware.

Which has nothing to do with why floating point numbers are often not used for financial transactions.

Re:Floating point in financial transactions

[queazocotal]

And for even more fun, exact rounding rules may be defined in law, and differ.

batch file versus kernel

[sjbe]

If your design can be done by someone with the education levels or mental faculties of a welder, it can be done by outsourced talent more cheaply anyways.

Apparently you have never tried welding if you think welders are dumb. (hint, it's really quite difficult to do well and requires a LOT of training)

That said, there is a lot of coding that is not practical to outsource. I am not a programmer professionally but I do some coding here and there as a part of my job. I'm not about to write a linux kernel or anything like that, but some simple coding to do my job more effectively is useful. Should I have to go get a CS degree before writing a few macros or a batch file or a shell script? Are you seriously arguing that I should outsource my macros to India? Some programming simply isn't very hard and can be done effectively by someone who isn't a highly trained specialist.

There is a place for highly trained CS experts and that is working on the large scale and challenging problems. It really is a waste of everyone's time to have them working on simple programs that can be adequately by people with far less training.

Indeed:Coding is a skill, not a profession

[luis_a_espinal]

That's all well and good until you find out they've been using floating point for currency calculations, and they can't figure out why their bubble sorts are so slow.

I've worked with programmers with associates degrees. Some bad; some good. I'm not entirely against them, but I would not want an entire team made up of them. They have huge blind spots that CS grads don't have.

You see that also with people with BS degrees, and I know about those (and a lot more) when I got my AA degree. Truth to be told, I knew more about programming and CS when I left community college than my sophomore/junior peers when I transferred to a 4-year university... and I met quite a few senior students and even grad students who couldn't picture an array of pointers to structures with function pointers as fields (not that you want to do that every day, but c'mon a senior CS student or grad student should have no problem visualizing that.)

I got a BS in CS, went to grad school and now I'm trying to go to grad school to switch into a more hardware oriented degree. I have 17+ years working on this, and I can say with great confidence that most "enterprise" programming tasks do not require a BS-level education in computer science.

More importantly, a good community college can provide, via a AS degree, all the tools needed to do work : systems analysis and design, structured and object-oriented programming, all that mixed with an intro to the basics of algorithm analysis (without the proving part), hands-on RDBMS, basic network/sysadmin skills and other fundamental skills like using/setting source control and bug tracking systems and technical writing.

You are right when you say you don't want to work with a group made solely of AA/AS graduates. I know; I started my career with a AA only, and I know for a fact that such a group needs more senior members to give technical direction.

But, for IT and the typical enterprise programming, we really do not need to know about the pumping lemma, prove the equivalence of turing machines to lambda calculus or the differences between micro kernel and monolitic kernels or proving some something on the structure of bizantine problems.

Blame it on the dot-com that we had a push for MOAR!!!(10+1)! 4-year degrees for web page design, which in turn converted most CS 4-year programs into Java/.NET vocational schools (where a person can graduate w/o even understanding what a pointer or a segfault is.)

The correct thing back then would have been to promote more community-college level vocational education as 2-3 year AS/AAS degrees. It would have been the best for the career, the nation and for all the students involved.

I love CS, I love my degree, I love my grad education, and God willing, I will get my Ph.D, and I love my line of work. But hell that I will ever propose that a BS degree is the minimum required to work on IT/enterprise programming.

I pray to ${DEITY} that this will become a firm step in the right direction.

What he means when says 'blue collar'

[dkleinsc]

What he really means, in a nutshell: "Programmers are paid too much."

Lying abstractions

[betterunixthanunix]

Floats are an example of what I have started to refer to as "lying abstractions." When programmers deal with floats, they are being told by their programming language that they are dealing with a representation of real numbers, and the only way to avoid the situation GP described is to expend mental effort remembering that a float only has some fixed number of bits. When you have a tight deadline, you are going to spend your mental energy on other things (hopefully program logic) and it is inevitable that somewhere, you will forget that floats are not arbitrary precision.

The better answer is to use languages with arbitrary precision representations of rational numbers. You will not have to deal with integer overflows, you will not have to deal with losing precision, and you can spend more of your time developing the correct program logic. Yes, it will mean a bit more in resources -- which can be fixed later if it becomes a problem.

There's a reason floats are implemented in hardware.

Yeah, and it is the same reason we continue to use C and C++ to write high level programs: history. If we were starting from scratch today, using the latest technologies and research, it is almost certain that we would do things differently.

Re:Programming is applied Math

[jedidiah]

I think everyone that wants to equate programmers with plumbers or electricians need to actually to go out and do these trades for awhile and ONLY THEN come back and try to feed us this line of bull.

classic programmer vs developer argument

[trippytom]

If you know mostly what you'd like to to, have a chosen path to get there, and time and $$$ to do it this model would probably work very well.

The problem is, I have NEVER seen that in my 15 years of developing. The technology landscape is constantly evolving, we need developers that know how to learn to do stuff ... not know how to do stuff. Assumptions and business requirements change, often daily. Developers need to communicate with businesses, persuade them to make good decisions (why I like developers with Arts and Sciences backgrounds). My guess is we'd get a lot more meaningless (not well thought out) stuff done which would buy us squat.

I don't want an army of semi-functional programmers, I want a FEW real developers.

I am in the beginning stages of teaching a lifelong MS developer and fanboy our Big Data environment. The poor guy basically needs to learn Nix, bash, sed/awk, SSH, cron, Ruby, MYSQL, EC2/S3 and Rails BEFORE we start talking about HDFS, Hive and Mahout. The ONLY thing I have going for me is his background in CS.

It doesn't matter.

[Anonymous Coward]

This kind of misunderstanding isn't what is causing the major pains in the industry.

Changing the educational emphasis won't address the major pains.

The major pains are caused by:

1) The perception that one cannot build a career on software development, because agism forces people to change to a completely different career sometime after they turn 35. True or not, this scares people away from the field, as it should, because if it is true then anyone talented/intelligent enough to do software development is talented/intelligent enough to do something else instead.

2) The perception that software development pays less than other fields that require comparable talent/intellegence. If true, it makes perfect sense that people who know they have what it takes would turn their noses up at a low-paying waste of their talents.

3) The perception that one is perpetually at risk for having their job outsourced to cheap foreign labor. Nobody likes working jobs where they don't know if they will still be employed the next day (and the deciding factor isn't even dependent on their performance).

4) The perception that developers are expected to overwork, sacrificing their personal lives for a company that won't even pay them overtime wages for it. Work-life balance is important, and people will shy away from careers that deprive them of it.

Address these perceptions, and address the issues that cause these perceptions, and you will see people naturally choosing to do software development again.

Refuse, and employers will face a lackluster market populated mostly by people with social/professional problems (or timezone, native language, and cultural acclimation problems).